Cultivating Creativity: I can't promise you a rose garden

Drawing upon research with Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) advisors, high-school principals, and two district-level administrators, we examine the potential and limits of the safe-space discourse that encompasses the aims of GSAs. We argue that this discourse conceals heteronormative school environments, which supplies the groundwork for hostility perpetrated against LGBT students. We then delineate three strategies–organizational, pedagogical, and systemic–toward altering the safe-space discourse to a forward-looking, social-justice discourse that fosters the eradication of heteronormative school processes.     

Building Culturally Responsive Communities

This article offers a variety of culturally responsive approaches and activities so as to better know and understand our students' diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. These methods will not only help to make more equitable classrooms where we make meaningful connections with our students—but also yield useful data so as to inform our yearly curriculum and instruction.     

Editorial Statement

It is contended that in Harvey Pegues's essay on objectivism and constructivism in the summer 2007 issue of The Educational Forum, Pegues conducted an intellectual discourse in which legitimate or good-faith disagreement was not an option, and disparaged and imputed the negative motives with which he disagreed. This article responds by pointing out the definitions and axioms used by Pegues that are vulnerable, and questions basic axioms about identity and existence from the standpoint of ancient Egyptian thought. The self-confessed nature of axioms—including those of objectivism—as incapable of proof or disproof is reiterated.     

Book reviews

Whilst there is now clearly an expectation upon parents to become more involved in schools and to take a greater part in their children's education, there is still little attempt to address the constraints upon achieving such aims. These constraints have been shown to include social class factors, gender relations, ethnicity and power relationships. This paper will take the analysis of some of these constraints further and, in particular, will focus on the views of working‐class parents on their relationships with, and role in relation to, their children's secondary school. The paper will explore the reasons for the orientation by working‐class parents which would seem to differ markedly from that of middle‐class parents. It will be shown that working‐class parents are committed to their children achieving educational success, and that they perceive their own role as supportive in a variety of ways. However, their position in relation to schools is to view the school as separate from their everyday social and cultural world and that the parent‐teacher role comprises a division of labour. It will be argued that teachers tend to adopt the same strategies for promoting parental involvement irrespective of class, parental needs, individual circumstances, and so on. Hence, because they take no account of differences, and because their strategies are constructed essentially from a logocentric position, then they serve to reinforce the parents’ perception of teachers as the professional ‘who knows best’: as the powerful knower which thus reinforces working‐class parents’ fatalistic view of schooling and their role as passive. The paper draws on data from a three‐year research project into the parents’ relationship with their children's secondary school. The data set which formed the basis of the analysis presented here comprises interviews with 58 parents from one of the case‐study schools which will be known as Acre Lane, and 15 of the school's teachers.     

Educational professionals’ values: voices from secondary schools in England

Background:?Values continue to play an integral part in education across the globe, but the importance of teachers’ personal values is often overlooked (Klein, M.B., New teaching and teacher issues, Nova Science Publishers Inc., 2006; Aspin, D.N., and J.D. Chapman, eds, Values education and lifelong learning: Principles, policies, programmes, Springer, 2007). It has been argued that teachers need explicit opportunities to reflect on their own personal and professional values to enable them to model what they ask of their students with integrity (Palmer, P.J., The courage to teach, Jossey Bass, 1998; Atkinson, T., and G. Claxton, The intuitive practitioner, Open University Press, 2000). Professional development is still often narrowly defined within the bounds of skills and competencies. However, discussion of values could help contribute to professional development by building teacher commitment and resilience.

Objective:?The purpose of this research was to explore the intrinsic values of secondary school professionals and the publicly espoused values of the educational systems in which they work. This research is the result of a two-year funded empirical study carried out by the authors in secondary schools in England.

Research design:?Research was undertaken in five schools in a range of educational contexts. In each school, individual conversations were undertaken with six key professionals with different roles to elicit personal constructs or values. These values were discussed within schools and formed a school's ‘values footprint’. An interschool workshop completed the data collection. Data were analysed qualitatively.

Main outcomes:?Qualitative analysis suggested relationships between the professional roles of the participants and predominant values themes. There were also connections between school types and predominating values. Four key themes emerged from the individual and group conversations: importance of dialogue; recognition of the importance of self-awareness; the priority of learning for life and the influence of professional roles on an individual's values focus.

Conclusion:?This small-scale study supports the importance of dialogue and self-awareness in professional life and ongoing professional development.     

Safety in numbers? Middle-class parents and social mix in London primary schools

Research into parents’ secondary-school choices suggests that many middle-class parents are keen to secure a middle-class peer group for their children. This article reports the findings of a small-scale, qualitative study into whether a similar phenomenon exists at primary-school level and, if so, why. In-depth interviews were conducted with 56 middle-class parents of pre-school children in inner London. Respondents often had contradictory impulses. Nearly all liked the idea of a socially mixed school but many associated the ‘wrong’ mix with various risks. Some of these perceived risks are familiar from previous studies. Others are less familiar, such as the fear among respondents that they themselves might not ‘fit in’ at their children’s school. The types of intake which respondents preferred fell into three overlapping categories: children from ‘pro-school’ families, children at a similar level of achievement to respondents’ own children and ‘people like us’. Respondents’ judgements about whether children and families fell into these categories were based in part on ideas about class, ethnicity and language. Respondents gravitated toward schools where most children were perceived to come from middle-class, white, English-speaking backgrounds. The article argues that attitudes towards children learning English as an additional language need to receive greater attention in future research.     

Inspection and the fabrication of professional and performative processes

This paper is about the issue of the performance of inspection. Based on research conducted in an English secondary school in the years following its time under Special Measures, I discuss the idea that during an inspection the school becomes focussed around performing for inspection. I discuss performance theory here as well as notions of performativity. I set the scene with middle and senior managers' recollections of life under Special Measures, in effect the time in which they learnt to perform. I then use data from time spent in the school before and during the school's OfSTED inspection, and discuss inspection as performance.     

Challenging educational injustice: ‘Grassroots’ privatisation in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa

The phenomenon of low-cost private schools ‘mushrooming’ in poor areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and elsewhere, is now well-documented. Findings from research by the author’s teams and others show that these schools are serving a majority (urban and peri-urban) or significant minority (rural) of the poor, including significant proportions of the poorest of the poor. Concerns are raised in the literature about their implications for social justice. In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen asks us to rethink ideas about justice; instead of the quest for a Rawlsian ‘transcendental institutionalism’, he argues for a comparative approach, grounded in the practicalities of human behaviour. Linking Sen’s ideas on justice with the grassroots privatisation leads to the tentative conclusion that those concerned with promoting social justice could agree to help improve access to, and quality in, the low-cost private school sector, rather than focus on the public education sector. Paradoxically, this could be true even for those whose ideal is an egalitarian public education system.